Little Monsters

Klayter McCabe

000

Kakashi doesn’t hate anything; he’s been a ninja too long for that. There are things, though, that he dislikes.

Many things.

One of these is when the members of the team he is responsible for training act like children instead of ninja.

They are children. He knows this.

They’ve lead different lives than he did. He knows this as well.

Sakura especially.

He’s not jealous, precisely. He wouldn’t have wanted a childhood. That sort of thing comes back and makes you weak. (Which he is, of course. Kakashi knows that he is weak. But he doesn’t want to be.) And Naruto’s childhood was strange, he knows, and twisted through with threads of misery. And Sasuke’s childhood was killed, he knows, and left bloody handprints on his brain.

But Sakura.

Sakura is still a child. And it makes him irritable.

It’s not that she’s stupid, because her intelligence burns when she cares to use it. It’s not that she’s naïve, precisely, because she’s grown up in a hidden village and out of necessity watched people die. It’s that she’s never had to kill anyone herself.

(Neither has Naruto, but inside of him is something old and deep, with memories of the slaughter of thousands, and that makes it easier, makes it harder.)

(Neither has Sasuke, but he helped scrub the blood of his clan from the streets of the Uchiha district, which makes it easer, makes it harder.)

Part of it is that Sakura is a woman, or a girl destined for womanhood if she lives that long, and say what you will, but kunoichi are different. Privately, Kakashi doesn’t believe that women are cut out to be murderers the way that men are. They have to kill parts of themselves to do it right.

Witness Anko.

That’s also why, he believes, a disproportionate number of medic-nin are women. Women are creators down to the womb, and men… aren’t. Women grow life inside themselves, from a collection of invisible cells to the squalling red brats that eventually emerge. Men contribute, of course, but it’s not the same. A husband can press his ear to his wife’s belly, try to hear the duel heartbeat, but it will never be inside him instead of her.

Women know exactly what it takes to create life, so Kakashi believes that it only makes sense for it to be harder for them to take it away again.

Unlike many of the genin this year, Sakura’s parents are not shinobi. She’s the first Haruno in three generations to graduate from the Academy.

(With a surname like Haruno, though. No wonder that clan doesn’t appear to be cut out to be warriors.)

So Kakashi thinks about it, and tries to change things in his slow, convoluted ways. He picks on Sakura, to make her realize that she is weak, but compliments her on her chakra control so she’ll know that she doesn’t have to be. He tries, when he leads his team on missions, to be an even more perfect shinobi than usual. He tries to show no emotion at all, to show them that in a way all ninja are dead, because they have to be.

On Team 7’s first real mission, for instance. On that bridge. He hadn’t meant for things to turn out quite that way.

(If Kakashi did hate things, killing children would probably make the list.)

It hurt him, to carry the dying man and lay him down next to the body of the boy. He did what he had to do, what was right and appropriate for the situation, which was to kill them both.

But.

Kakashi doesn’t deal with mental “what ifs,” doesn’t replace the faces of the living with the faces of the dead, or replay situations in his mind and try to figure out what he could’ve done differently, could’ve done better. He had enough of that not long after Obito, when the Sharingan eye still leaked constantly, a liquid that slid down his face cooler and smoother than tears.

It’s not that he wants to protect his team, protect Sakura. They volunteered to be ninja, and to try to shelter them now, when they have the most to learn, would be no less murder than any of the other deaths he’s caused.

Shinobi lead complicated lives.

Sometimes, reading Jiraiya’s stupid porn, he gets a wave of longing that pulls directly from his stomach, so strongly that it hurts. There are people who really live like that. Well, perhaps not lives quite as soap operatic or porny as Jiraiya writes them, but the idea remains the same. There are people who live like that, and sometimes when he remembers that all of a sudden he wants it so badly that it aches.

Then he sneers at himself with an expressionless face and forces himself to continue reading, even if he’d rather throw the book against the opposite wall of the room.

Some people live like that, but they are weak and small and live lives without urgency or meaning, and when things get difficult they call people like him, people from the hidden villages, to fix it. Life isn’t nudity and silly hijinks and poetic declarations of love and hate and desire.

Life is ugly and blood and dirt and stupid and hurt, and if you’re lucky somebody remembers you once you’re gone.

It’s not that Kakashi wants to protect Sakura from those truths. It’s not that he doesn’t think that she can handle it – there’s a strength there. It’s a quiet strength, and harder to see than Naruto’s, than Sasuke’s, but it’s perhaps more tenacious than either of theirs. Sakura doesn’t have the kind of burning strength to protect all that is good with the world as Naruto does, nor is hers cold or bitter or killing her from the inside, as Sasuke’s does to him.

Sakura’s strength is what it will take to survive, something that not nearly as many shinobi are as good at as they think they are.

Witness the thousands of unnumbered names on the memorial stone.

That untapped strength is why Kakashi lets Sakura get away mooning over Sasuke, who’s barely enough of a human to notice. Why he lets Sakura let the boys of the team protect her, why he doesn’t lecture her the way he does her teammates.

Naruto’s childhood isn’t necessarily over, won’t necessarily ever be. Naruto has the sun inside of him along with the fox, and it offers what protection it can.

Sasuke’s childhood has been over for years, and he’s systematically destroyed all that he can of his younger self, leaving nothing but the shell which he must think is what the perfect ninja is supposed to be.

Sakura, though, doesn’t nurse any demons at her breast yet. She will, once she needs to draw on that strength she hasn’t had to yet, the one that will kill her enemies with speed and efficiency and blindfold her emotions. Sakura will have plenty of time to be an adult then, to find her coping mechanisms and which parts of her soul will need to die to make her a true shinobi.

She’ll never be a happy monster, like Naruto.

She’ll never be a faceless monster, like Sasuke.

Kakashi isn’t the kind of man who allows himself the luxury of regret, so instead he only wonders what kind of monster Sakura will grow up to be.

000

End “Little Monsters”

000

June 7, 2005